When the Net began to evolve it was interesting to see what unfolded first. Yep, you guessed it was the easy business models like lists, search, news and online versions of paper publishing.
When I decided to get into the Internet business I said to myself “everyone in this ASP (Application Service Provider) game is going to run off and do the easy ASP’s first”. So I decided to avoid the crowd, create my blue ocean and do the hard one everyone will leave to last.
Interestingly it’s been nearly eight years in this business and it’s only now we are seeing some new faces. I blogged about well being yesterday and mentioned that this market has upside. What business person in their right mind doesn’t think soul soothing has a market for many years to come.
I feel compelled to explain a little further. My hypothesis is that the number of high quality news websites divided by the number of news magazines is a very large ratio (I’m using the term websites to represent blogs and portals). It’s an anecdotal ratio as I don’t have time to do the math or research.
There must be millions of websites dedicated to news but only hundreds of magazines. My second guess is that the number of high quality Lifestyle Websites versus their paper magazine counterparts is much lower.
Anecdotal evidence you can collect online by doing a quick Del.icio.us check of bookmarks reveals that this might be true. There are only 45,000 bookmarks for “Lifestyle” but a massive 1,250,000 for “News”. Even adding in terms like “Health” and “Well being” to bump up the “Lifestyle” numbers still has you at well bellow 500,000 relative to “News” bookmarks (yes I know it’s bookmarks, but to me that represents a vote on a page that is content of type “x”. You can’t ignore it).
Google returns an even more interesting result. 1.4 Billion versus 100 Million. A very large difference. Do you think humans allocate their time at a 14:1 ratio of News:Lifestyle. I don’t think so! Accordingly I smell upside in the air.
So you’ll see more high quality sea change, zen generation and soul soothing content like The Calm Space as overstressed and overworked humans try and fix themselves.
Why the difference? News is easy as long as you don’t expect to be first with the story (expensive). Lifestyle is harder as it requires skill and knowledge to write successfully. It takes new ideas to add value to readers. It requires managing the crossover between spirit and body.
All these things would have hit people as tricky or difficult when considering starting a website. It was easier to build a website and scrape ideas from others and call it a news portal. Looking at readership online is going to be the winner long term. One day you’ll be subscribing to the paper version of the online publication, not the other way around.
Devices are what will change this and they are coming thick and fast to your morning coffee reading as Leah pointed out to me.
